"It's really sad, it's lost now," says Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner, reflecting on the fate of the company he left in 2011.
Opera had made serious inroads in the Noughties embedding a browser into consumer products, where it was a pioneer, and had a sizeable following on both desktop and mobile.
Its high performance …

Re: Sad but true.

Re: Sad but true.

Unique to Apple, my @ss - WebKit was nothing but a fork of KHTML, the engine under Konqueror, KDE's default browser and back then also default file manager, I remember (I was an early supporter and huge fan of the Konqueror project - the default file manager now is a more streamlined utility but Konqueror is still going strong as a browser AFAIK.)

there's only one thing Opera pulls now

"You need to have something unique and different - and Opera had that. It had all those deals on TVs and embedded. (...)"

They still have it and make new ones, just look at their news posted at opera.com. And no that didn't make the user growth skyrocket.

"When I quit we had 60m desktop users and were on a nice growth path. We'd have blown through 100m by this time if we'd improved on the browser. Now it's down to 50m and most people are still on [the Presto-based] Opera 12."

He seem to have forgot to check that the users loss all happened in the Presto era. There's a downfall since around Opera 12.0 and since Blink Opera appeared the downfall is not as big as before. In the latest they lost only 1 million users, that's compared to a lot more: kind of about 5 million in every previous quarters.

Day 11 of this month the Q4 financial report will be released with the newest number of users so we will be able to talk more about that later...

Well, von Tetzchner can kiss my...

...rosy browser - while his product was ahead of other in many ways it was also one of the slowest-supported, slowest-developing one out there, taking YEARS to implement a &^%$ mail client, still refusing to support HTML-formatted mails etc etc.

Icing on the cake was their usually arrogant behavior, apparently stemming straight from the top "von"...

...OTOH what was more troubling actually their sometimes downright unethical practices: during my serious last attempt to switch to Opera I was already syncing my profile for a couple of months, using on my O login, when for a few days in a row in an online argument with a dev I strongly criticized some of their lackluster developer performance - ie calling it a junk or a pile of shit - on one of the dev blogs and suddenly a day later my Opera login stopped working. Yes, they banned my Opera login.

No, not from the blog or forum or whatever - from the ENTIRE OPERA NETWORK, essentially taking all my passwords, bookmarks, history, everything hostage and not only never giving anything back to me but couldn't tell me if it ever will be deleted (FWIW the login was still active but banned 2 years later.) Tried to engage some higher ups, pointing out that such behavior is actually clearly illegal by EU laws, not to mention privacy issues etc but all I got was a half-witted secretary writing me some arrogant, half-assed responses from her boss (do you believe that their heads were so far up in their corporate asses that they didn't even bother replying to emails themselves???)

I wish they could stick around and provide a choice but with this kinda behavior von Tetzchner should just STFU about his time at Opera - to me it really looks like he was the one that drove it into the ditch before he left as he couldn't build the proper corporate structure and scale up thus couldn't make it into a serious competitor, giving it enough firepower to sustain R&D/innovation etc.

PS: let emphasize that I DID ADMIRE their little innovations, their different approach etc and I always thought their time will come right when social media takes off a big way - imagine all these things handled *properly* by the browser - but Flock, RockMelt etc came and disappeared and Opera didn't do anything except stopped developing even its own engine and became just another Chromium skinning project... and this is the result of a long process, one that started well under this guy who now, in hindsight, claiming 20/20, as they always do.

Where fools rush in, other fools follow

I used to read slashdot.org, but I've now stopped because they are determined to force a horrible re-working of their web-site on their users. They seem to be completely deaf to the howls of protest from their contributors, and like Opera, I predict that they will become a footnote in the history of the web.